


breathe

by QueenOfTheWesternSky



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Introspection, Multi, Not TRK Compliant, Post Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-30
Updated: 2016-11-30
Packaged: 2018-09-03 08:00:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8704108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfTheWesternSky/pseuds/QueenOfTheWesternSky
Summary: Gansey’s death breathes life back into Noah, and Adam’s back into Cabeswater.And so they go on.





	

Gansey’s death breathes life back into Noah, and Adam’s back into Cabeswater.

She’s never seen Noah breathe before, and she thinks it might be these small things that keep her from completely crumbling. Watching his chest rise and fall, leaning into the weight of Ronan sitting beside her. She isn’t sure what time it is—late. It had been late before the police had gotten involved, and the three of them had sat there while the lights flashed and they tried to piece together the scene in front of them. They’d been so in shock, none of them had been any help. Had been able to explain what had happened.

Her mother arrives too quickly to be responding to the call from the police, she must have known before they called. She says she’ll take all of them home. This can be sorted out in the morning. They’ve been in the car ten minutes before she thinks about Henry, she doesn’t know where he is, only that he’s not in the car with them. The cops took the Pig. Impounded it. Ronan had clenched his fist so hard, his palm began to bleed. She’d tried to stop him, but had just ended up clinging to his clenched fist. His blood was dried under her fingernails.

None of them have moved or said a word since Maura came to get them. But then Noah reaches for the hand resting on her knee, and his skin is _warm._ That alone is enough to startle her. Blue begins crying, she doesn’t know when—or if--she’ll stop.

 

When Maura said ‘take them home’, she really meant take them all back to Fox Way. Noah enters without incident, he’s still holding her hand—Ronan holds her other wrist. It seems no one is under the impression that sleep will find them anytime soon. Ronan looks exhausted, Blue doesn’t say anything about it.

They’re presented with some kind of tea from the cupboard, and normally Blue might question it but she doesn’t. Noah lets go of her hand once they sit down. Ronan’s grip on her wrist remains tight, and she can feel the dried blood on his palm. She doesn’t try to break the hold. It’ll leave a mark later, but that’s more of a comfort than anything.

She thinks Maura might be saying something, but she isn’t listening. She’s still focused on Noah’s breathing beside her. It’s uneven, stops for a moment then picks up again, like he’s forgotten how after so long not having to. She wants to cry again, but there aren’t any tears left. Eventually, her mother stops trying. Leaves the room.

“What do we do now?” The words that break the silence come from Noah, who looks startled by his own existence.

She looks at Noah, mouth open to speak but nothing comes out. Turns to share a glance with Ronan—his eyes are dark, hollow. She thought she’d seen sadness on Ronan Lynch before, but this is something new. This is emptiness. It seems both right and so very wrong, after all, what do they have left now? Without Adam, without Gansey, without Glendower.

A court without a king.

“I don’t know.” Blue whispers softly and she finds herself reaching blindly for Noah’s hand again. She needs to feel it, the warmth of his skin. Needs to know she’s not the only one left alive.

 

They can’t go to the Barns, or Monmouth. That much is decided quickly and without much argument from anyone.

Without Adam, without Aurora, the Barns is an empty place full of empty dreams, the home of a past and a future that don’t exist anymore.

Monmouth is full of echoes of Gansey, of his quest for Glendower, of the hope they’d all once had.

Neither place can be home ever again. Blue doubts anywhere will feel like home again, without them. It goes unsaid that Fox Way becomes a halfway house for wayward Raven Boys. Noah is so startled by his own existence once more that he doesn’t question this. Sleeps on a couch somewhere sometimes, but often finds his way to Blue’s bed. She’s glad. It makes her feel better momentarily, to be able to curl around one of her Raven Boy’s protectively, to feel him draw breath, a hand over his chest, feeling the steady _thump-thump-thump_ of his heart through his shirt.

Ronan leaves. Often. But he always comes back. Everything will be calm, as calm as it can be, and something will set him off. He doesn’t say anything usually, occasionally swears under his breath as he thunders out of the house. Drives away in his car—the police won’t release the Pig to any of them, and they’ve not heard a word from Gansey’s family—and comes back when he’s ready. When he’s run out of steam. Usually late at night, when most of the house is asleep, or otherwise quietly pottering around their rooms.

It takes a few weeks before he’ll enter Blue’s room unless otherwise dragged in there by her. But soon he does. Her bed isn’t big enough for two, let alone three, but she shifts herself—and by extension Noah, who lets out an unhappy sound but remains otherwise undisturbed—and Ronan sits down by them with his head against the headboard. She reaches for him and he holds her wrist in his much larger hand.

(She’ll learn later that holding someone this way is more secure, is how acrobats catch each other, how they stop one another from falling. Maybe she won’t ever truly understand the mystery that is Ronan Lynch, but for a moment, she thinks she comes close.)

This is how she falls asleep, when she can sleep; curled protectively around the newly living Noah, held to steadfast and safe by the not so newly broken Ronan.

 

Noah doesn’t exist. Not legally.

One would think it would cause more problems than it does. As it turns out, between Ronan’s dream dealings and the sizable amount of money Gansey had gifted to each of them in his will (of course he would, what other eighteen year old would have worked out his will?), most people are willing to overlook the three of them and whatever it is they do.

They move away from Henrietta. It’s always _they_ now.

It’s almost funny, Blue was so desperate to find herself, to find a purpose and an identity and all the magic in the world that she felt she’d been denied. But now she’s a part of something else, and some days she doesn’t know where her Raven Boys end and she begins. She thought that fact would bother her but it doesn’t.

She also thought Ronan would die in Henrietta. Not like the others did, she had thought that the very earth of Henrietta was in Ronan’s blood, that he would dig in his heels and live and die there. But he’s detached now, from everything. He doesn’t put up a fight when the idea of leaving comes up.

Noah seems to have accepted that there’s no going back for him, that even with life breathed back into him, his family and everything he ever knew is in the past. That Noah is died long ago, this Noah belongs to Blue and Ronan and Adam and Gansey, even now, even with their bodies commended to the earth, they all seem to still belong to one another.

On the drive to wherever it is they’re going, Ronan driving thirty miles over the speed limit because she thinks the speed takes the edge off, and by now she’s learned to trust that even though Ronan Lynch might very well kill _himself_ this way someday, that he won’t kill either of them. She tries to remember what once occupied the vast space in her chest now owned by her boys, including the aching parts of her that had been Adam’s, had been Gansey’s.

She can’t remember if there was ever anything there, how had she lived so long with that void inside herself?

How was she going to live so long now without it?

They end up a thousand miles away from home, in a city Blue has never been to, in an apartment that apparently the Niall Lynch had owned to make deals with whoever it was he made deals with when he still drew breath. Technically it belongs to Declan now, but none of them think about that. What Declan doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

They don’t bring much with them at all, only what they could fit in the car. Despite the expensive looking dream furniture that fills the place, Blue sits on the ground in front of the floor to ceiling windows and watches the sun go down.

Stars. She can see so many stars from there.

When the others eventually give up and join her on the floor, she wonders if the five of them are still a constellation, now that they’re down to three. She wonders if anyone will mind if she borrows some of the stars already clustered into images as old as time to write new legends in the sky of mages and raven kings.

 

She does this every night. They’ve all accepted that coping mechanisms are strange and often make sense to no one else, she doesn’t understand Noah’s fascination with glitter or the way driving fast enough to kill seems to be the only thing to keep Ronan’s heart beating some days.

They both sit with her most nights. Always Noah, sometimes Ronan.

Some nights they fall asleep there, leaning on one another, draped in a blanket dragged from one of the beds that don’t get used, and wake with the sunrise. Those mornings, she almost forgets where she is or who she is—forgets why she’s there, a million miles from anything she’d ever known, from anything she’d ever planned to know—and she knows peace.

“Why d’you do this, maggot?” It’s been quiet for hours, with the only sound being Noah’s steady even breathing as he slept, his head pillowed in Blue’s lap. Ronan’s voice cuts through it, always sharp as a knife, like everything about him.

“—when I was young and I was mad about not being like everyone else in my family, I thought…I thought when I looked at the stars, it was as close to magic as I’d ever feel.” She’s looked at these stars so many times now, rearranging them all in her mind to tell the story of the epic journey they went on that no one will ever know about now. “Thought that if I could go somewhere to see even more of them, that I’d finally know what it was like to be _special._ ”

She expected Ronan to have some scathing comment for her, something cutting that he only half means. But he stays quiet, and out of the corner of her eye she can see that he’s looking at her. Like she might have answers.

“Looking at the stars felt…infinite. Like every possibility in the world was stretched out before me. Like I could be anyone, do anything.” And for a while there, she was exactly who she wanted to be, doing exactly what she wanted to do. Even if it hadn’t been her quest at first. Even if they hadn’t been hers when it started. “—and I keep thinking, if I just look long enough that I’ll see all those possibilities again. That I’ll see _them_ again, that this is where they are now, lost in the magic of all those possibilities.”

Again, Ronan doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t look—doesn’t prompt him, because he hates that. She almost jumps when she feels his hand brush her own, her other threaded through Noah’s hair, feels their fingers intertwine and for a moment there is silence and she feels the closest thing to peace that she can while awake.

“I miss them too, Sargent.”

And for a moment, the stars are full of possibilities once more. Not the ones she’d seen before her boys when all she’d wanted was to be somewhere and something else, nor during their quest when they were invincible, immortal, the eternal court of the Raven King. But new ones that stretch on into the night, where they might breathe life back into each other.

A thousand miles from anything she’d ever known, from Henrietta, from the leyline, from Cabeswater, and she can almost _feel_ it again. What it had felt like to be infinitely possible, to love their quest, to love _them._

She holds onto them both tightly, and learns to love the ache in her chest where _they_ once were.

**Author's Note:**

> Prior to reading The Raven King, I was pretty goddamn sure that Adam and Gansey weren't going to make it so suffering fanfictions ensued. I don't even know what this is.


End file.
